EDUCATORS, leader writers, parents and
politicians are concerned
that the nation's teenagers are becoming obsessed with
Hitler and then Nazis. Why? Since Britain is
booming and Tony Blair bestrides the world, it can
hardly be a chauvinistic desire to humble the Hun
with remembrance of crimes past.

Nor can the popularity of the subject solely be
ascribed to the desire of tenured radicals to display
their "anti-fascist" credentials to a world still
relatively ignorant to the crimes of Marxists.

Maybe it is simply that the Nazis have what some of
adolescents require: dark glamour, drama, easy political
allegiances, moral absolutes, deviance and vicarious
violence. Any other justification for this prurient level
of interest (the "never again" cliché) is surely
so much self-serving guff, for no book or film inoculates
people against charismatic politics (think
Berlusconi and Schwarzenegger) or,
regrettably, parties of the populist and extreme
right.

With weary curiosity one
turns to the first instalment of Richard J
Evans's trilogy on the Nazis. While the
introduction is heavy on details of the author's
career and querulous wiggings for competitors, it
offers a few clues as to why a scholar of Evans's
calibre should produce three tomes on this subject,
though cynics might think of some answers.

Any new book on the Nazis must offer original archival
research or a compelling interpretation. This book
conspicuously lacks the former, while the author's
aspiration to encyclopaedic coverage militates against
the tight focus required for the latter. Too many
passages resemble a checklist that Evans feels obliged to
tick off, such as industry or the arts under Weimar,
without their relationship to the advent of Nazism being
made explicit. His discussion of Nazi ideology is
especially underwhelming.

The first 20 pages are a competent account of the
pre-1914 German empire and the Weimar republic. Its
concerns mirror the evolution of historical literature
since about 1970, without daring to think outside its
limitations. Things have moved on since Timothy
Mason (the guru of British neo-Marxist historians of
Nazism) taught at Oxford. By contrast, the First World
War is compressed into six pages making this seminal
event incidental. What else lowered the acceptable
threshold for violence?

Evans's account of Hitler's life before he became a
political figure tells us nothing that wasn't in
Ian
Kershaw's recent biography, plus the unremarkable
intelligence that his "disciples" fell under the
Führer's spell. Spells belong to the realm of "hey
presto" rather than to serious historical accounts. No
attempt is made to probe the content and delivery of the
pseudo-messiah's message, which is analogous to writing
about [Winston] Churchill with no
reference to speeches that still reduce Britons to
tears.

More seriously, the absence
of any sustained discussion of why millions of Germans
voted for the Nazis, and the author's evident
sympathies for the Marxist opposition, lead to a
caricature of doughty leftists being beaten up or
killed by sweaty, beer-swilling thugs while the rest
of the population has vanished.

We are told that Protestants and women voted
disproportionately for the Nazis, without learning why.
Perhaps he put a spell on them, too? If the former gap is
unsurprising for a secular-minded academic, the latter is
less excusable in a historian of 19th-century German
feminism. While there is plenty of colourful detail about
deviants and mass murders, the greater challenge eludes
him of explaining why plain working people, of all
classes, turned to Hitler.

And onto the Nazis in power, for the teleology is so
familiar as to lack all dramatic tension. There are
powerful passages where the author seems engaged with his
subject matter. These include classical music. Where his
style finally springs to life, although not journalism,
literature, film, theatre of the visual arts, subjects
where discussion goes through the motions.

He is convincing, too, on the
jiggery-pokery in German academia once such characters
as Heidegger gained power, but then most people
know what academics are like.

The
book ends with a discussion of whether the Nazis carried
out a revolution, a question surely only important to
those prone to the false romance of the Jacobin or
Bolshevik tradition. Perhaps in the next two volumes
Evans (right) will display his talents to greater
effect by chucking away the historiographical handbooks
so as to bring some fresh air to stale subject
matter.